What We’ve Come To

Yesterday I attended a concert of music by student composers. None of the pieces were atonal. None were minimalist. None were postminimalist. None were spectralist. None were written according to any kind of system. All except one had big romantic gestures. Chords crashed down in the piano. If there was a cello, which there usually was, it came barreling up off the C-string into its highest register and then played harmonics. Everything was big, impassioned, virtuoso gestures. And before, during, and after the concert the faculty ran around congratulating themselves on how wonderfully diverse in style the students were.

I asked my savviest colleague what he thought the students were most influenced by. “Hollywood,” he replied.

UPDATE: After so many comments so quickly, let me parse what I think the above means somewhat. It’s an impressionist sketch, and exaggerates – but just slightly. When the students write the way the faculty teach them to, the faculty tend to be satisfied with the range of stylistic diversity – this is probably true everywhere. Minimalism is considered passé. The students don’t know grid-pulse* postminimalism ever existed, because I am its only representative in academia. Spectralism is attractive to the older and more sophisticated (grad) students, but requires some technique. Fidelity to any kind of -ism or movement is seem as an anachronism anyway. Once you declare all ideology invalid, what metric is left but success? I think the students are very aware what kind of young composers are getting a lot of attention lately, and it’s generally the ones whose music makes a lot of noise and allows for expressive virtuosity. It’s a crowded field, yet if you get famous in it by age 30 you can do very well. Individualism will not help you toward that goal – if you’re different, it takes too many decades for people to figure out what you’re about. Being identified with a movement will not help. I got the impression here of a race toward one pinpointed goal, some students reaching it more effectively than others. (I suspect the faculty partly define the race, and that the ubiquity of film music can’t help but shape its direction.)

*Since, just as the masses use minimalism to mean Wagner, Ravel, and Gregorian chant, people now use postminimalist to mean whatever they want it to mean, I am introducing (as I’ve threatened to) the term grid-pulse postminimalism to refer to an important American movement of the 1980s and ’90s that I’ve spent decades documenting. It was a style of steady tempos, diatonic harmony, and occasional elements of quasi-minimalist process, and its notable practitioners include Paul Epstein, Elodie Lauten, William Duckworth, Peter Garland, Mary Jane Leach, Daniel Lentz, Mary Ellen Childs, and many others. The leading article on the style is my “A Technically Definable Stream of Postminimalism, Its Characteristics, and Its Meaning,” in The Ashgate Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (Ashgate Press, 2013). Since I invented the term it means what I intend it to mean, and if you think it can mean something else, you are mistaken. Didn’t realize the Joisey crowd was here tonight, have to define everything.

UPDATE 2: Heavens, more than 1100 hits and so many responses!, to what I thought was a spur-of-the-moment throwaway post. While I have everyone’s attention let me underline one point, and not my main one; my main one was well stated by Stefan Hetzel in the comments, that even student works should have something individual about them that mattered strongly to the composer. The 1980s, with its fight amongst serialism, minimalism, and neoromanticism, is conceived by young composers today as having been a living hell. Today, when one is so bold as to mention postminimalism or any -ism except spectralism (because it’s European), everyone yells “Boo! Hiss!” and forces you to admit that no such distinctions are valid, music is only music, and we’re all individual, like snowflakes. Yet the existence of musical movements did chart out a realm of musical diversity, and drew contrasts among different philosophies of how music could or should operate. Take all that away, tell students that there are no differing philosophies, no schools of thought, and what is there left for them to do, except do their competitive utmost to become, by age thirty, the number-one purveyor of virtuosically emotive gestures, since that is the behavior rewarded by new-music performers and music critics? I realize that I am in a tiny, microscopic minority on this issue, and that there are likely no younger composers at all who agree with me. But I find the prevailing anti–ism, anti-movement consensus anti-intellectual and anti-art. I am a dinosaur, overdue for my extinction, no doubt, but at least you can’t accuse of me of groupthink. And we are seeing the erasure of all philosophical barriers result, I think, in an increasingly stultifying homogeneity – at just the time in which diversity is ideologically prized as being the highest good.

Interesting post, I am always interested in what young composers are writing and would love to hear some of these pieces – whether or not I would like them.

I was brought up in Malta and most of our parents were in the armed forces. On the request programmes there were lots of sentimental pop songs for service families missing their families back in the U.K. When I submitted such a piece to my Hungarian composition teacher (who was in the same composition class as Ligeti when he was a student) he said “just because you write bad music intentionally it doesn’t make it good”.

However I suppose this is inevitable. Not only is it a reaction to the previous generation, we live in hard times so maybe Romanticism is better suited to the zeitgeist of our times.

Apropos something you wrote a few posts ago I met my friend yesterday who said his 22 year old daughter is really into to Lachenmann and that period of experimental music..

@Kyle: Sad but true 🙁 Recently, I was invited in Robert HP Platz’ (he studied with Stockhausen) composing class in Würzburg (Germany), introducing myself as a postminimalist composer. Sceptical looks. I asked students for their role models. No answer – execpt one: “Hans Zimmer”.

First I thought this was a joke, but it was not.

Since then, I’m asking myself: If Hans Zimmer is your role model, why are you studying with a Stockhausen follower? It’s a mysterious world out there.

@Ian Stewart: “we live in hard times so maybe Romanticism is better suited to the zeitgeist of our times.” – Would you be so kind to elaborate on this?

@Howard Fredrics: “Anyone for a bit of Strauss?” – I wish it was that simple 😉 I think the problem Kyle wants to point at is not the lack of popularity of a certain Kunstmusik-style like Minimal music or Spectralism among young composers. The problem seems to be a lack of creative impulses *within* art music itself. The last two impulses I am familiar with were Complexism (Ferneyhough) and New Conceptualism (Kreidler). The first one is extremely elitist, the second one is just art music’s overdue catch-up with the general conceptualization of art in the last 50 years (of course, Minimal music is an ancestor of New Conceptualism, not stylistically, but, er, conceptually).

A very interesting post. It does seem obvious that a tendency to write in the more obviously tonal and romantic manner to which you refer never really did die. Even more than looking to Hollywood for the reasons, one could go even deeper and perhaps point out that these musical characteristics are simply a basic human impulse. Clear tonality and longer lyrical melody have always been at home in popular musical culture. More and more young composers nowadays are willing to directly connect with this as well as with their own innate romanticism, not to mention the great romantic tradition (which has always been popular in the concert hall and has furnished popular culture with many great tunes). Composers no longer see this as something that needs to be fought against, especially now that the mid 20th Century High Modernist strictures against such manners of expression are slowly becoming history within the academic setting. .

But Hollywood is now Hans Zimmer, who sounds like a cross between ’80s Philip Glass and Peter Gabriel. Maybe the “romantic manner” did die (if it’s a basic human impulse, somebody forgot to tell all the humans before about 1804), even in Hollywood – circa the early ’00s, when people stopped caring about John Williams? – and the classical music scene is just getting the memo later than everybody else.

The most important aspect of music during the Enlightenment Era (cf. Dahlhaus, etc.) was its ability to convey emotion and speak to the heart. Enlightenment theorists thought that music had more ability to convey such qualities than did sculpture, painting, or literature, (and to go a little further, for Rousseau in the 1750s it was the air or melody that bore the bulk of the emotional content). That is why they considered music to be the most romantic of the arts. Music that did not adequately convey emotional qualities was considered worthless to them. In view of this, romanticism in music was around long before 1804 (which is about the time the term, having had established itself previously, therefore began appearing in lexicographical works). In their time, Mozart, Haydn and their contemporaries were considered romantic composers, a fact that Taruskin’s six volume Oxford History (2005) now recognizes in that it dispenses with the somewhat ahistorical “Classical Period” and instead categorizes Haydn and Mozart as representative of the first romantic generation in music. .

ETA Hoffman, who is, as far as I know, the first documented case of somebody classifying Haydn and Mozart as “romantic,” wasn’t exactly their contemporary (born 20 years after Mozart, 6 years after Beethoven).

As for music conveying emotion, that was of course already considered important in Renaissance and Baroque music (key word, “sentiments”) (and of course referring to 1725 as “Baroque” is perhaps even more a quirk of music history than referring to 1785 as “Classical”). Probably in medieval music, too, I just don’t know anything about it.

Anyway, what you call an innate impulse toward “clear tonality and longer lyrical melody” would explain why Kyle’s students don’t write like Boulez (too bad). But it doesn’t explain why they write like – I don’t know, Jennifer Higdon, or whoever exactly it is that they sound like – and not like Janice Giteck.

According to some 19th C reference works, Reichardt (b. 1852) did as well. Someone like the Mozart scholar Cliff Eisen could undoubtedly be more authoritative about that (see his contributions on musical topics in the recent Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850)

Agree that the use of Baroque is something of a quirk, and a relatively recent one (1950s) at that! Prior to that Bach was assigned to the Classical Era. Makes us wonder how such categories will continue to change as the 21st Century wears on…

For me, that Kyle Gann’s students utilize some form of tonality, etc. and do not write like Boulez is all to the good (brilliant as the latter is)!

“Success” on the terms you suggest (fame, Hollywood, public virtuosity) is an ideology as well, or has become one. In many schools of music, students are often exhorted to play to the market, either explicitly (entrepreneurship!) or tacitly, by looking around to see what kinds of new music are getting attention. Devotion to particular compositional systems may be suspended, but devotion to a social/economic system of marketability and prestige is taking its place. “This storm is what we call progress.”

Composition should demonstrate the individual personality of the composer, when new compositions sound like “Hollywood” there is probably not much originality there. Mahler was a composer in the Romantic period, using techniques of the time, but was original. My composition teacher, Normand Lockwood, always told me to be myself, not him.

“The students don’t know postminimalism ever existed, because I am its only representative in academia.” This is interesting, because as a casual spectator, I’m not sure how I could HELP knowing about JL Adams and Bang on a Can, at least – the NY Times and the New Yorker keep writing about them, they win Grammys, Slate just had a piece about Taylor Swift giving money to the Seattle symphony because she liked “Become Ocean”… maybe, as Kyle says, students have figured that the money is in neo-romanticism, and everything else just gets filtered out? I have no idea.

I assumed you were using the term loosely. Apparently not – so, I guess you meant your students know those composers, but not William Duckworth, Daniel Lentz, Elodie Lauten, or you (except for the obvious reason)?

KG replies: Exactly. Also Janice Giteck, Jonathan Kramer, Ingram Marshall, Peter Gena, Paul Epstein, Peter Garland, Paul Dresher, Mary Jane Leach, Stephen Scott, Mary Ellen Childs, David Borden, Guy Klucevsek, Phil Winsor, Joseph Koykkar, Thomas Albert, Sasha Matson, Wes York, and quite a few others. More than a list of people, it was a huge, pervasive movement of the 1980s and ’90s. Though it produced a broad repertoire of beautiful and diverse music, it wasn’t macho and kickass, and the critics never gave it the time of day. Thus today outside of my writings you’d have trouble finding evidence it ever existed.

cool, in the 1980s all academics had to write the same way. I was a science grad student but in Columbia Composers and was pretty much excommunicated for not writing the current academic style. People should write what they love, and if it comes out the way they want it to, someone else then is likely to love it too. Now that there is no money in music, we are all in the same boat, and while making a living sucks, we can work together from different styles and traditions in a healthier way. It’s fantastic that young music lovers can now write whatever they think without being ostracized – of if I’m still idealizing, at least its more so.

Perhaps today, music is rarely a stand alone art. The young composers hear music through film and most of the public “sees” music by videos. It’s a natural thing, I suppose.

Maybe if all the postminimalists had videos….

KG replies: But Henry – you do! And certainly, there are a lot of young composers enjoying major careers out there without videos attached. I think they’re the role models being imitated here. Nice to hear from you.

Without knowing who the composition teachers in charge are, its difficult to draw any definite conclusions here. However, my sense is that any composer with an original bent would have voluntarily or involuntarily left such a straitjacketed program (such programs may well be widespread), or such a person’s piece would simply not be allowed to be performed. It’s often the case that “accomplished” composers are mediocre teachers, more capable of generating clones than allowing one’s individuality to flourish in meaningful ways.

Steve Reich and Philip Glass both attended Julliard and studied with Vincent Persichetti. Glass went on to study with Nadia Boulanger, a first rate teacher, but hardly a revolutionary. La Monte Young was playing jazz in Los Angeles in his early years. Terry Riley cites John Coltrane and Miles Davis as early influences. So let’s not give up on the undergraduates just yet…

I got a B- in composition this year, in my last year of high school. I felt so pressured to write “normal” music by my teachers for a good grade. It was horrible, frankly. My teacher kept telling me to limit myself, not go all “out there”, it “actually has to sound good”. I still have no idea what exactly constituted something which “actually sounds good” to him.

And by the end after fumbling around a whole year trying to wrangle some “normal” music out of myself, I have nothing but a B- and only one short piece that I’m somewhat happy with. I could have spent the year composing in my own time and learnt a lot more in the process. I would not ever choose a university course on composition after that experience: maybe it’s the same for others.

KG replies: You sound like my kind of student. I’m thrilled when their music isn’t normal.

I don’t think the comment on film music applies. While not a fan of it, it is anything but consonant music for the most part, lots of overly sustain dissonances

KG replies: You know, I didn’t really think much of it actually sounded like film music (it wasn’t for orchestra), but it did strike me as a Hollywoodish idea of what the profound and passionate composer should sound like. And the soaring physicality of the individual gestures did remind me of Richard Strauss.

Composition should demonstrate the individual personality of the composer…

Boy, that’s a 19th century preconception. Did Perotinus’ compositions “demonstrate the individual personality of the composer”? How about Longinus’ composition? Or how about Petrus de Goldescalc?

This frenzied obsession we have today, in our late late Romantic musical culture, with composers exhibiting “novelty” and “originality” and “demonstrating their individual personality,” remains a bizarre notion of how music should work — a notion not even remotely shared by most audiences throughout most of Western history, let alone audience in the rest of the world.

Ask yourself — should gagaku music “demonstrate the individual personality of the composer”? Should gamelan music “demonstrate the individual personality of the composer”? Should the drumming of a tabla
player in a morning raga “demonstrate the individual personality of the composer”? F**k no! These forms of music are all narrowly constrained and dictated by very detailed sets of rules. The notion that “originality” or “novelty” or “expressing your personality” are the main objective would seem to the typical gamelan player or the skilled raga player absolutely absurd.

Richard goes on to remark:

when new compositions sound like “Hollywood” there is probably not much originality there.

Oh?

Really?

Listen to Jerry Goldsmith’s wild score for Planet of the Apes.. You’ll find ten times more originality than in the collected shlockmusik of the Parisian Kook (founder of IRCAM), the Darmstadt Kook (who pulled his pants down a squatted and let Klavierstuecke plop on the pavement) or the Geriatic Kook (excretor of Double Concerto, among other acoustic atrocities) put together. Or if you want some real outer-edges music, listen to Louis and Bebe Barron’s electronic score for the film Forbidden Planet. Done in 1953. Still groundbreaking after all these years.

You know, criticizing 20-something composers strikes me as fairly unproductive. I was not doing great music in my twenties. I doubt Kyle was either. Beethoven was not doing very good music in his 20s. There are very damn few composers who do good music in their 20s.

More to the point, what this kind of review really tells me is that students today want to produce vividly memorable intense dramatic music. Guess what? So do I. If they’re honest, so do most composers who haven’t gotten fed into the woodchipper of musical ideology and theory, theory, theory, numerology, numerology, numerology. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, quite so boring and trivial and dated sounding as yesterday’s daring smashing startling amazing new breakthrough avant-garde composition. The biggest cliché of all is novelty. The most boring musical retread possible is the stunning shock stunt, pioneered by the likes of the Coin Flipping Kook. Shock stunts quickly lose their ability to shock, leaving you with a feeling of pity for and disgust with the kind of desperation and lack of imagination and passion that led someone to (for example) set a piano on fire and call it a “composition,” or flip coins and call the results “music.”

In the liner notes to Pavilion of Dreams, Harold Budd writes memorably about he composed himself into a corner. His compositions got more and more conceptual, more and more avant-garde, more and more concerned with grand dramatic cutting-edge “big ideas,” until he finally wound up writing himself into total silence. After a couple of years of that dead end, Budd found his way out — by writing music that sounded pretty. “Not `ta kalon,'” he writes, “not the Greek conception of `the beautiful,’ but mere prettiness: simple, devastating, unappealable.”

Sounds to me as though students have heard the shlockmusik, they’ve suffered through the cheap stunts and infantile verbal calisthenics masquerading as music, like 4’33”, they’ve endured the numerological onanism like Gruppen and Pli selon pli, and at the end of the day they just want to write something that grabs the audience in the gut instead of inspiring people to make notations on the score and say “Oohh, nice all-interval sets in that one.” I guess we’ve now reached the point where vividly memorable music gets described as “Hollywoodish” and “soaring physicality of the individual gestures” gets slammed as musty ancient Richard-Strauss-style stuff.

We’re physical beings. We come at love through sex and visual attraction, and we come at vividly memorable musical experiences not through counting the number of clever permutations in the retrograde inversion of the time-point series of the cross-interval set, but through the shockwaves of bliss evoked by sensual torrents of sound.

As far as claiming that a bunch of young 20-something composers at an elite Hudson Valley New York college that costs a quarter million bucks for a four-year degree don’t exhibit radical diversity of styles…oh, please. C’mon! I defy you to show me any group of people anywhere in any elite New York institution that costs a quarter million bucks a pop that exhibit notable diversity.

Rich high-end New York institutions cultivate uniformity. D’oh, as Homer Simpson would say. People in New York eat at the same delis, ride the same subway lines, live in the same neighborhoods (or used to, back when people could actually afford to live in New York), read the same books and newspapers, and argue about the same things. The New York music scene is a small small small small club, and most of us ain’t in it.

You want diversity, Kyle? Try Erv Wilson. Hint: Erv ain’t in New York. Or you can try Warren Burt. Once again, not a member of the New York music scene. Then there’s Henry Gwiazda or William Schottstaedt or Bill Wesley. None of these people can be found in the New York music scene.

The complaint that young students today don’t exhibit the diversity of the downtown music scene in the 1980s seems like an ignis fatuus, first because the downtown music scene in the 1980s just wasn’t all that diverse (Where was the computer music? The microtonal synthesizer music? The home-built instruments? The electroacoustic music? The music being made interactively with KIM-1 computers or hotwired Commodore 64s, as the League of Automated Composers were doing in San Francisco in the 1980s? Where was the American gamelan music?); and, second, because one college in upstate New York restricted to people who can afford to plonk down a quarter mil for a 4-year degree limits the sample population so much that it’s not remotely comparable to the downtown music scene of the New York 80s.

Plus, let’s not forget that the New York music scene has been utterly wiped up by Donald Trump’s insane skyrocketing property values and rent costs. Hell, Kyle, book stores can’t even afford to stay open in New York city anymore because of the rents. You think that in this environment, where a person has to make $150,000 a year before they can even think about affording a loft in New York city, that young hungry imaginative composers can afford to move to New York and create those diverse amazing but not tremendously popular compositions that gave the place whatever diversity it had in the 80s?

Gimme a break. The New York arts and music and literature scenes are all dying because no one who isn’t a hedge fund manager can afford to live in New York. That quarter mil pricetag on a Bard four-year degree is just another symptom of the destruction of the New York cultural scene. “Culture” in New York today has been reduced to the dead degraded cul de sac of Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God, a sculpture which “consists of a platinum cast of an 18th-century human skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds, including a pear-shaped pink diamond located in the forehead that is known as the Skull Star Diamond.”

When you reach that kind of aesthetic and moral and intellectual bankruptcy, diversity got left behind about 15 freeway exits back. New York today belongs to the Martin Shkrelis and Jamie Dimons of the world. “Creativity” in great big expensive cities (and the colleges that act as their appendages, like Bard) now means finding new ways of jiggering the tax code to hide hedge fund profits overseas in a Cook Island trust. Not music or art or literature.

I suspect your music students (most of whom are probably not hedge fund managers) realize this. In such a dessicated and degenerative New York aesthetic shreklickheit, they probably fall back on vivid emotion and grand musical gestures because, hell, why not? If you’re going to wind up as a barista working part time at Starbucks after you graduate with your music degree and sleeping on somebody’s couch in an apartment 6 people are chipping in to rent, you might as well produce some music that makes you feel something.

KG replies: Oh Brian, don’t get your knickers in a knot. I agree with almost your every point, and you know it. I’m not faulting the undergrads, and you know that. I’m mad that their teachers think the little slice of the stylistic pie they’re teaching them is the whole thing. I’m mad that music critics like to play god by anointing 28-year-old composers as the next genius based on pieces that do no more than make a lot of hectic noise. I’m mad that composers in their 30s are so conflict-averse that there’s no aesthetic discussion anymore. I’m mad that the other forces that used to hold commercialism at bay are now all atrophied. When I was an undergrad my music sucked, but I was imitating Berio, Stockhausen, and Crumb, whose music was new at the time, as well as Tibetan chanting and minimalism and conceptualism. Major record labels introduced me to brand-new avant-garde music by composers 20 years older than me, not 65 years older as Lachenmann is to these kids. The world wasn’t inherently more interesting then, but the interesting parts of it were easier to find, they were part of the culture. I’m mad because new music is a huge, diverse place, and I only see a little sliver of it reflected in these kids’ music because that’s all the world presents them with.

And don’t go searching for things to complain about. I didn’t even use the word Downtown. If these kids are influenced by film music, you can be sure it’s John Williams, not Louis and Bebe Barron whom they’ve never heard of. And you know goddamned fucking well, from every book I’ve ever written, that my frame of reference is not in the least limited to New York composers. That’s your neurosis, and I did nothing to trigger it. New Yorkers complained because I wrote too much about Midwesterners and Californians. I appreciate your contrarian viewpoint, but wait until you’re in a better mood before you post a comment.

Did Perotinus’ compositions “demonstrate the individual personality of the composer”?

Probably. I mean, scholars attribute works specifically to him “on stylistic grounds.”

Ask yourself — should gagaku music “demonstrate the individual personality of the composer”? Should gamelan music “demonstrate the individual personality of the composer”? Should the drumming of a tabla
player in a morning raga “demonstrate the individual personality of the composer”? F**k no! These forms of music are all narrowly constrained and dictated by very detailed sets of rules. The notion that “originality” or “novelty” or “expressing your personality” are the main objective would seem to the typical gamelan player or the skilled raga player absolutely absurd.

Or maybe those of us who don’t want music to demonstrate the individual personality of the composer are selectively interpreting non-western cultures, so that we can claim they validate us. (Like westerners have been doing since at least the 18th century.)

(Ravi Shankar’s music didn’t have “something individual about them that mattered strongly to” him (which is what Kyle actually said)?

the shockwaves of bliss evoked by sensual torrents of sound.

That sounds a lot more like Pli selon pli than Pavilion of Dreams. Just saying…

KG replies: As you point out, even this is an unnecessary argument. What I said was, “[E]ven student works should have something individual about them that mattered strongly to the composer.” That does *not* mean the works should express the composer’s personality. Total straw man on McLaren’s part.

I suppose movements and isms have now been replaced by genres. The various genres and sub-genres of rock, rap, and dance music are debated, defended, and attacked with the zeal applied to any ism. It seems to me that the criteria are based more on fashion and commerce than on theory, but that was true of all movements anyway. I could be wrong. At any rate, many listeners now see classical (and postclassical) music as another genre, and one that isn’t very fashionable or commercial.

I’m curious about what your students are listening to. I spent my teen years listening to Ives, Satie, Cage, Crumb, Penderecki, as well as older composers, since it was all readily available. There were concerts; newspapers reviewed the music; there were record stores to buy records and music stores to buy scores. Now all is available online, but you have to know what you’re looking for before you type it in the search box. What are they listening to, and how did they find out about it?

And pace Mr. McLaren, most people I meet think I’m a kook just for reading and writing music, rather than doing something more fashionable and commercial.

You may be viewed as a dinosaur, I suppose. (Remember what Bach’s kids thought of him?)
I don’t care much about this issue because I don’t care about students. Not to be cruel, but I am a composer and not a teacher — I care about the art form of Music.
I also don’t care about most composers. They write with an agenda. Or alliance with a particular technique, or under the influence of another (the teacher). Or subordinate to a film. Or fascination with some new electronic box.
I only care about music that has been ripped from someone’s soul. Something they HAD to write because if they didn’t get it out they would get sick. Other than that — I won’t be bothered. One can tell in a few measures (if they used measures) if they are the real thing or not.
Everything has been done. There will be no more “movements” in music, or art, for that matter. Start with Chant and draw the line to Cage. Start with Cave Drawings and draw the line to Abstract Expressionism. There will be nothing “new.” On one hand, that thought is depressing; on the other, it’s totally liberating. It obviates the entire notion of “old-fashioned.” Everything is old now, and everything is in play.
But ONLY to a composer whose motive force is passion. Student or master — THAT’S who I want to hear.
Thanks for your good work.

“Virtuosic gestures” and the end of isms is nothing new. You wrote about us 14 years ago, Kyle! You said you’d adjust and learn! And now, you can re-ask the questions you asked us then, and we’ll answer, yes, there were many pieces by Downtowners who inspired us, including yours (and still do today!). Cheers! http://www.villagevoice.com/music/the-uptowners-among-us-6396054

KG replies: Well if I wrote about it 14 years ago, I’m sorry to have mentioned it again.

I was a composer on this concert, and I have always written the music I feel and hear naturally. I enjoy movies, but don’t feel particularly influenced by Hollywood. Nor do I think my music is Romantic. At least not exclusively, or in a traditional sense.

I have never compromised my artistic vision to be more appealing. I write who I am, or I do not write at all. I am grateful I have the luxury to think in such a way.

I will continue on my path, regardless of what anyone says. I am excited to be on such a journey.

KG replies: Daniel, you’re right, your piece didn’t have big romantic gestures either. As I said, the description was a little exaggerated. The Hollywood comment was not mine, after all. My point was that the range of stylistic diversity was overall quite narrow, and that he faculty were representing it as very wide.

I’m a young composer, and by young I mean I can count the number of compositions I’ve made on one hand, I’m not even legally allowed to drink yet. I agree completely, there isn’t enough strange, new music in the world, it’s getting harder to think up new ideas. I want to compose film music because I love the way it makes me feel, but I want to make it different. I want my music to be weirdly enjoyable, but it’s getting harder and harder to be original. For now, I will explore and hopefully be taught by someone like you, who is looking to the future of music and not hiding in the comfort of the past.

Thanks for this post. Teaching in London I notice a very similar attraction to big Romantic gestures by student composers (except they often add a sprinkle of spectralism as if to make their work sound more ‘up-to-date’). Its as if musical history stopped when Debussy died and picked up again in the ’80s. However the composers in London who are most often performed by the big establishment organisations also compose in this sort of hybrid style and no doubt the young composers are attracted to their success as much as to their music which often has a startling immediacy but much of which starts to sound very similar after a while. Recently a young composer told me he HATED Stockhausen’s music (!) and when I asked him which pieces of the 350 or so works he was referring to he couldn’t name or describe any in detail. Fairly typical – hadn’t listened to any but had heard or read opinions.
I do believe individuality is something which should be valued and nourished but will only emerge after a great deal of exploration and solitude, neither of which many young composers seem to have patience for, and who can blame them? Personally I think of someone like Agnes Martin as being the ideal model for a young artist today buts that’s because I’m a different person to whom I was when I was in my 20s.

Strangely (or not) I am seeing a similar problem of uniformity and lack of exploration in the work of young student composers (no, I’m not anywhere close to NYC at this point) The problem to me is that when I talk to these students they don’t know this other stuff exists and, even worse, they are not particularly interested in the exploration of what happened in music not only in the last 50 years, but in the last 700 years… Seems to me that when I was in school exploration was all we wanted to do… maybe because it was much harder thing to do… I sometimes ask myself if having too much access is a problem. If It is too hard for students to go to the library and check the scores out I shouldn’t expect originality in their music anymore….

Kyle Gann

Just as Harry Partch called himself a "philosophic music man seduced into carpentry," I'm a composer seduced into musicology... Read More…

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So classical music is dead, they say. Well, well. This blog will set out to consider that dubious factoid with equanimity, if not downright enthusiasm [More]

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